John High
Angel in the Pocket
(a fictional autobiography)
1. The Sound: Shenandoah Valley
When I was five years old, a man unknown to me came and took me to church. It was a big church, and he baptized me there. I wondered if my small body was drowning as he held my head under the water. This was the first of many baptisms. Afterwards, I stole a tiny angel from the altar. It seemed fair.
The angel missing a mouth.
The angel in my pocket had an inscription on its base:
the meek will inherit the earth.
I was not meek.
But vulnerable.
The poem in my pocket, singing.
This angel with a ‘broken mouth’ would sustain me, the song guiding the trajectory of my life as a poet, leading me into cemeteries, death, translation, renewal; and ultimately, preparing me for writing a book—the koan I’ve been living for many years--Scrolls of a Temple Sweeper.
These stories cannot hurt you, the angel once whispered.
Perhaps they will please you and those gathered around, those living, those dead. Listen to the stories. You are the one who imagines and
you are the one who is imagined.
Did I write the Temple Sweeper, or did he write me?
You write each other. That’s what poets do.
Perhaps I dreamed this.
Or the angel with a broken mouth was dreaming me.
2. The Call: Talking God’s Orphanage
By the age of twelve I had taken to frequenting graveyards where I began to write poems. As I lived in various orphanages and reform schools and educated in what I was told were “retarded classes,” this did not seem strange to me. We were smarter than all of them. And I fought their bullies.
They made me the ‘child radio preacher,’ and I was tutoring the older kids in exchange for not getting beat up.
Among them was a one-eyed boy who became my constant companion,
a mute girl who followed us to the river every day--
some might have called them my imaginary friends,
but they were real to me.
I hid out in libraries reading, and over time, took to stealing books of poetry, memorizing the words.
Everything around us is saying our story, boy--
Hear it buzzing in the wind?
Hence began my official study of verse and uncovering its silence.
3. Jumping off the Cliff, Learning How to Fly
I was already fourteen
the first time I died.
I was staring out the window from the back seat
of a stolen pick-up truck,
lost in the sky--
suddenly startled by the tree tops--
banging against the windshield
as an older hoodlum, drunk, steered
the truck off a cliff,
while I was finally becoming
one of the many stars from the book now in my pocket
telling the tale of a little prince.
A run-away of lost children,
we had robbed the orphanage that night,
and broke my brother free from the state psychiatric ward.
It was so easy.
I just walked through the unlocked back door,
sometime after midnight, a gun in my pocket, and took a white jacket
from the closet.
But no one was even around.
When I unstrapped him from the bed,
All my brother said was--what took you so long?
When I woke up, bloodied, looking up at the cliff above us,
the medic at the crash told me
we’d miraculously landed in a swamp.
You almost died, boy.
Though now on my way to jail, and forever awe-struck,
we all survived.
The angel crawling from the wreckage,
brushing off the wound, would later remind me --
We once thought we were the story,
though it is only words we choose to speak.
You, boy, are a deep sound in the forest,
becoming all these foreign worlds around you.
And now you’ve learned how to fly.
4. The Beckoning: Appalachian Mountains
For my sixteenth birthday, a mentor at reform school
gave me a book by William Blake.
He called him, Billy.
That was the name of my only brother.
I was blown back, swooning in the infinite,
never alone,
hiding in the bathrooms
studying these visions.
Everything was possible.
I was a hero, and a heroin addict.
I was trying to get by.
The one-eyed boy said—since you’re no longer going to school,
we can gather in the imaginary hills.
No one will find us.
Steal this book--The Idiot.
A curious man, Fyodor Dostoevsky.
You will understand.
Blake will walk with us there.
He is not dead.
We can meet by the river in the sky.
Clouds become clouds.
Water becomes water.
Mountains become mountains.
They share with us arriving in these stories.
5. The Passage: Crossing to California
With the help of many invisible poets, I stole a car, escaped the world, no longer a captive.
Hopping freights and leaving the known word behind, I spent years jumping railroad cars, going state to state, dream to dream, poem to poem. Days in public libraries, reading, sleeping. Finding first, Emily Dickinson, then Walt Whitman, Sappho, James Baldwin and others who began to sing with the angel in my pocket.
And another poem entered the song.
I want that verb on horseback, the what should be, Osip Mandelstam called to me.
And so we went on, together.
These sounds guiding me the night I broke into a church for my eighteenth birthday,
where we went to pray,
pray a scroll for the book.
After the police took me, the arresting officer sighed,
I almost shot you, boy, for putting your hand in your pocket,
instead of raising them both.
I want that verb on horseback, I told him.
The judge dropped the charges.
Said one more strike, and it’s prison for you, boy.
Free again, we roamed the great voices of a nation.
Searching myself, the landscape, the legacy of the South’s
violence—always writing on scraps of paper for the pocket.
After a few years, accepted into university.
The draft of my first book of poetry called Ceremonies--
This my entry, and condition for parole
after stealing another car,
though I only drove it through the night in the hills
and parked it again where I found it,
and the local sheriff found me.
Still, free from addiction at last, it seems fast.
But it was a very slow becoming.
6. The Mute Girl’s Diary
You, Our Story, you must allow me to speak.
I found these words scratched into the desk of my college classroom
waking one morning in the building
where I secretly slept most nights,
scavenging the cafeteria after the other students left
for their own classes.
We have something to say, and to unsay,
the mute girl wrote into our diary,
speaking with her tongueless tongue
as a continuation of flights,
no longer afraid.
But university was not yet a life we could abide,
though eventually we would return.
Thus we ended the first book,
and vanished into the silence.
7. Leaving the Past Behind
When a tree stands up on its own, Poet--
we call that its original face.
You listen with your eyes to the teachings
of stones, trees, mountains, and seas.
Come with us into the wilderness.
How could you hear my words if you do not hear this?
You are writing these scrolls,
hearing your own innermost request.
When you truly enter the world of words,
you find you are free of words.
Among trees and rivers, there is no reason to hide.
The boy wrote me this on the day we hitchhiked north,
leaving our pasts behind.
8. Returning the Stone: The Great Northwest
Blake called again—weep, weep, weep.
I wept and laughed, became a lumberjack.
Moved to the forest,
built a wiki-up in the mountains.
Lived as a hermit.
Learned to listen as words became trees and the trees
breathed our silence.
There’s no going back, the one-eyed boy said.
It’s just blood in the mouth.
This mystery sent a quiver through the black ink.
Find these syllables crows drop from their beaks
when you today awake to the sound
before sound in the forest,
the girl had crayoned into a stone downstream.
This passing into a new alphabet of dreams.
Can you read it yet, Poet?
9. Searching for the Voices After
Leaving a Bar in Walla Walla, Washington
The one-eyed boy was peering through the rows of books one afternoon
in a town library somewhere along the road,
where we followed the tracks of an abandoned train to a bar room of cowboys.
Later that night, toward dawn, sneaking out the basement window
of the library where I had slept,
the mute-girl who trailed us into these parts,
signaled to me
while studying a small fishing boat
on the river nearby.
Then waving her tiny hands
like birds floating in the air,
somehow speaking without words--
don’t worry, someday we’ll find home.
The birds around her, maybe they were the ones
Talking, and I wanted to understand.
I wrote this down in our diary
so I would remember the nameless sounds
coming off the rushing white caps of the water,
flying all about with these crazy cormorants.
10. A Few Words from the Wilderness
Before I Was Born
I wrote a play in verse, called it Sometimes Survival.
Dropped it off at a post office along the way to Alaska.
It’d been a hot summer of tending to the horses, bailing hay
in the depths of Wyoming.
And survival was enough.
The flickers of unwritten letters gathering
in voices of wind and rain
with these Appaloosa sleeping calmly in the fields.
The older trees further north called to us--
keep writing in your scrolls,
we need to hear our own stories.
Why, it’s like peeling back layers of skin, boy,
or opening the pages of a book
you thought you read long ago.
But you somehow missed the pages
that tell the story of your own life.
I bought a new set of clothes, a Russian dictionary, a knife,
the finest boots I could afford.
There were things I needed to do.
These languages will someday inhabit you, the angel muttered,
Brushing off her wings,
beginning to remember
how to fly,
and how to sing.
11. The Angel Beginning to Speak in Another Language
You want something permanent, boy,
but the world is not permanent.
It is indefinite, unknowable, complete with the magic of just what is.
Blue leaves floating on the water point to your scrolls,
the angel uttered in a hushed voice
by the campfire that first morning near the boats
where we had camped under a bridge with other fisherman,
discovering a new way.
12. Sailing the Seas: Finding Russia
First, working the canneries, then the fishing boats,
becoming a reader of clouds and stars,
navigating the awesome seas,
studying foreign words through the long nights
on deck alone keeping watch,
surrounded by albacore and shark.
We wandered a new vocabulary.
Soon enough working the freighters.
Cargo ships.
A gambler.
(This was too close a call to another death.)
Once, a driver of tractors. Combines.
A builder of houses.
A rogue, vagabond.
Going down circuitous, secret rivers.
Finally, just a bit of the deep blue sea for me…
Osip Mandelstam wrote in his own exile.
Years would pass in our dialogues.
My translations of Osip’s ‘notebooks’ continued.
Gradually other books of my own:
the lives of thomas: episodes & prayers
The Sasha Poems—A Book of Fables.
Bloodline: Selected Writings.
Though lost,
lost with the poets.
13. What Tense Do You Want to Live In?--
Fall of the Soviet Union and We Are There
Almost suddenly, an unknown poet appeared in the pocket.
Akhmatova wrote us one day in one of her poems--
Come, meet us poets.
Though it is forbidden.
Come, behind the Iron Curtain.
So many of us murdered,
Yet many are alive,
and continue our voices.
…the sleep bigger than hearing, the hearing older than dreaming,
unbroken, piercing, Mandelstam had written, and we translated in the diary.
The poets of the Soviet Union welcomed us.
I was thirty years old, becoming one of the many.
We read in subway stations, the long lines at kiosks, in cafes and on street corners, part of the kitchen culture of the scorned ‘citizens of the night.’ They honored me as a member of the unofficial Club Poetry.
Later, when the tanks bombed the Russian White House in 1991,
we read our poems for the underground radio.
We were all prisoners.
Yet we were breaking free.
Just a bit of the deep blue sea for me….
Meeting with students, passing tanks on the way to the university, arriving to the classroom in Moscow with the bombing audible nearby, reading Marina Tsvetaeva and Daniil Kharms aloud with the poets—later invited to read at Pasternak’s grave—gave me a deeper sense of poetry’s significance in the world.
What is it to think without your own native tongue?
Everything became translation.
Without any one language,
poetry embraces its own transliteration.
Osip saying before his own death in Stalin’s camps--
Only in Russia does poetry matter so much that they kill the poets.
Experiencing the rise and (and then demise again) of democracy, participating in endless protests and readings of poetry—profoundly changing my own tongues. How the sound of wound becomes word, the sound of forgiveness becomes freedom? I want that verb on horseback, the genitive. And now it was time to translate the song of the angel who came with me after my first baptism as we were now baptized illegally in Pushkin’s church on Lenin Hills, honoring the sound before sound.
14. The Angel Opens Her Broken Mouth
Over here.
Look around, boy.
There is the one beyond sound.
And it looks like you.
Each wave of the body a breath flying forth.
Hear your own voice among many, the angel called out,
standing in front of an armored personnel carrier of soldiers,
asking them in Russian—Where did you fellas get the Petrol to use against your own citizens?
These people are all wondering the same question as they stand and wait
in these food lines.
They’re starving, comrades.
15. Scrolls of a Temple Sweeper
We are born.
We die.
We return.
These words of the temple sweeper emerging in the scrolls with the one-eyed boy and mute girl, calling more strongly. First echoed in The Desire Notebooks, a book-length poem about the end and beginning of the world, traveling through time in all the places of destruction,
seen through the eyes of revolution in Russia: a telling and retelling of a story within timeless time, a pilgrimage through difficult landscapes of birth and death.
The Temple Sweeper spoke to me and I transcribed the words:
This wind has brought us together again—all of us always swooped together from some great storm. Or like these days and nights when the many, many thousands and millions of moons merge together, flow inward together, emerge together throughout the history of clocks and rhyme of bells to guide us lost children still remaining on the roads behind.
The mute girl then wrote this into our story, and hence we knew, it was time forge on.
16. The Monastery: From Tassajara to Bodhidharma’s Cave
At the age of forty, I became a monk.
It was in the monastery that the scrolls began to take shape and being.
The Temple Sweeper’s poetry unfolding in thousands of pages.
Though I was the temple sweeper now,
I translated his unknown alphabet into my own language.
A temple sweeper, a mute girl and a one-eyed boy traversing a torturous and tortured terrain, both natural and manufactured, a landscape of lost and found, of shapeshifters and ghosts and a prominent ghostwoman, of monks and hermit nuns, fish and birds. The angel grew to full height, singing more often in the pages.
A Zen monk, my concentration was hearing.
My name, Enduring Monk/Deep Sound.
We all made our way in the scrolls.
No force could hold us back.
What I remember tonight as I write this is that it seemed a trance caused me to lose track of time and place, of my body itself, of the boy I remembered as a boy, the boyhood of his wandering in the deserts and mountains before coming to this monastery. And this body was somehow again seeing me, recollecting, being, becoming.
And again we departed to be the wanderings of a poet,
a monk of no rank.
Entering a world among the miraculous.
I became a father.
I was born.
I died again.
Exiled.
Returned.
We traveled on,
into the refuges of the worlds,
from Bodhidharma’s cave to Rumi’s grave.
On deeper into China, Tibet, Cambodia,
the places we had always dreamed,
visible now.
The boy and girl and angel, inseparable,
Forming in a nightly choir, humming the sound--
All stories are trees.
All stories are sea.
All stories are river.
All stories are you.
All stories are we.
17. My Brother—A Passageway from San Quentin to Eternity
My brother Billy overdosed.
Blake began to, once more, weep—& sing us on.
With the help of the many poet-monks,
we got Billy released from prison.
These friends from the various abodes
of Christian, Sufi, Taoist and Buddhist homes I had met throughout the pilgrimages
of ten years came to my aid.
Everything changing.
Still, the last overdose, the last.
For years uncountable, we went on with Billy and Blake,
only in this body of red dust.
I wrote a book-length poem dedicated to him, which grew into a tetralogy,
singing along with, and for him:
First in a book, here, a poem for Billy High, and then, a book of unknowing, followed by you are everything you are not, and finally vanishing acts.
The acts of vanishing
all pointing to release.
This allowed me to explore what was possible in vernaculars of the inanimate: of trees, clouds, rivers and seas, and how the deep listening and penetrating of sounds transform the possible patterns of poetry, the peculiarities of voice as it translates into a passageway, or portal, time as being, Zen master Dogen once wrote, healing grief and love, traveling from birth through death and back again, carrying us further on with the voices yet untold. What emerged was that the meditation of writing is itself a pilgrimage.
It was time to go home.
18. A Letter from Suchness from Brother Bill
Ah big brother Ninso, brother Johnny,
Thank you for giving me, and hearing, this voice. My own voice, yet also of your own. One we’ve cultivated and healed over these years since I left this body of red dust, and also the joyful pure eternal being we are together.
Thank you for your sturdy meditations for us all. For your pages of liberation of so many lost children in the scrolls—with your own liberation from fear and doubts—for not turning away, for helping us as you, and we, go on in this way.
For the books you’ve written since boyhood, and for here itself, that you wrote for me, as our continuous return now manifests in your scrolls and your story of a boy’s odyssey.
Please celebrate it all, good brother monk and poet—and try not to forget how your very words bring an ease to those of us who’ve moved on in this great mystery, and for these all around you who each day in your lighting of the candles and offering of the incense, you dedicate your life in humbly offering gift-bestowing hands.
We are you, and you are us,
and we are grateful,
brother of mine.
Brother of the orphaned angel.
Of the orphaned one-eyed boy and mute girl,
and countless buddhas.
And we are already celebrating your miraculous arrival in this world of the many worlds, big brother, as you celebrate mine in this same month. Our singing and dancing commence together.
So chant the sutras, your prayers, your mantras—and realize we are chanting and vowing, bowing and smiling, with you.
We are not dead, nor gone.
Like the moon
Continuously shining
In the dark
Come forth.
We love you.
We are one.
And you can include this in your story, if you want.
Either way, always cherish these words, big brother.
Love,
Brother Bill
(a fictional autobiography)
1. The Sound: Shenandoah Valley
When I was five years old, a man unknown to me came and took me to church. It was a big church, and he baptized me there. I wondered if my small body was drowning as he held my head under the water. This was the first of many baptisms. Afterwards, I stole a tiny angel from the altar. It seemed fair.
The angel missing a mouth.
The angel in my pocket had an inscription on its base:
the meek will inherit the earth.
I was not meek.
But vulnerable.
The poem in my pocket, singing.
This angel with a ‘broken mouth’ would sustain me, the song guiding the trajectory of my life as a poet, leading me into cemeteries, death, translation, renewal; and ultimately, preparing me for writing a book—the koan I’ve been living for many years--Scrolls of a Temple Sweeper.
These stories cannot hurt you, the angel once whispered.
Perhaps they will please you and those gathered around, those living, those dead. Listen to the stories. You are the one who imagines and
you are the one who is imagined.
Did I write the Temple Sweeper, or did he write me?
You write each other. That’s what poets do.
Perhaps I dreamed this.
Or the angel with a broken mouth was dreaming me.
2. The Call: Talking God’s Orphanage
By the age of twelve I had taken to frequenting graveyards where I began to write poems. As I lived in various orphanages and reform schools and educated in what I was told were “retarded classes,” this did not seem strange to me. We were smarter than all of them. And I fought their bullies.
They made me the ‘child radio preacher,’ and I was tutoring the older kids in exchange for not getting beat up.
Among them was a one-eyed boy who became my constant companion,
a mute girl who followed us to the river every day--
some might have called them my imaginary friends,
but they were real to me.
I hid out in libraries reading, and over time, took to stealing books of poetry, memorizing the words.
Everything around us is saying our story, boy--
Hear it buzzing in the wind?
Hence began my official study of verse and uncovering its silence.
3. Jumping off the Cliff, Learning How to Fly
I was already fourteen
the first time I died.
I was staring out the window from the back seat
of a stolen pick-up truck,
lost in the sky--
suddenly startled by the tree tops--
banging against the windshield
as an older hoodlum, drunk, steered
the truck off a cliff,
while I was finally becoming
one of the many stars from the book now in my pocket
telling the tale of a little prince.
A run-away of lost children,
we had robbed the orphanage that night,
and broke my brother free from the state psychiatric ward.
It was so easy.
I just walked through the unlocked back door,
sometime after midnight, a gun in my pocket, and took a white jacket
from the closet.
But no one was even around.
When I unstrapped him from the bed,
All my brother said was--what took you so long?
When I woke up, bloodied, looking up at the cliff above us,
the medic at the crash told me
we’d miraculously landed in a swamp.
You almost died, boy.
Though now on my way to jail, and forever awe-struck,
we all survived.
The angel crawling from the wreckage,
brushing off the wound, would later remind me --
We once thought we were the story,
though it is only words we choose to speak.
You, boy, are a deep sound in the forest,
becoming all these foreign worlds around you.
And now you’ve learned how to fly.
4. The Beckoning: Appalachian Mountains
For my sixteenth birthday, a mentor at reform school
gave me a book by William Blake.
He called him, Billy.
That was the name of my only brother.
I was blown back, swooning in the infinite,
never alone,
hiding in the bathrooms
studying these visions.
Everything was possible.
I was a hero, and a heroin addict.
I was trying to get by.
The one-eyed boy said—since you’re no longer going to school,
we can gather in the imaginary hills.
No one will find us.
Steal this book--The Idiot.
A curious man, Fyodor Dostoevsky.
You will understand.
Blake will walk with us there.
He is not dead.
We can meet by the river in the sky.
Clouds become clouds.
Water becomes water.
Mountains become mountains.
They share with us arriving in these stories.
5. The Passage: Crossing to California
With the help of many invisible poets, I stole a car, escaped the world, no longer a captive.
Hopping freights and leaving the known word behind, I spent years jumping railroad cars, going state to state, dream to dream, poem to poem. Days in public libraries, reading, sleeping. Finding first, Emily Dickinson, then Walt Whitman, Sappho, James Baldwin and others who began to sing with the angel in my pocket.
And another poem entered the song.
I want that verb on horseback, the what should be, Osip Mandelstam called to me.
And so we went on, together.
These sounds guiding me the night I broke into a church for my eighteenth birthday,
where we went to pray,
pray a scroll for the book.
After the police took me, the arresting officer sighed,
I almost shot you, boy, for putting your hand in your pocket,
instead of raising them both.
I want that verb on horseback, I told him.
The judge dropped the charges.
Said one more strike, and it’s prison for you, boy.
Free again, we roamed the great voices of a nation.
Searching myself, the landscape, the legacy of the South’s
violence—always writing on scraps of paper for the pocket.
After a few years, accepted into university.
The draft of my first book of poetry called Ceremonies--
This my entry, and condition for parole
after stealing another car,
though I only drove it through the night in the hills
and parked it again where I found it,
and the local sheriff found me.
Still, free from addiction at last, it seems fast.
But it was a very slow becoming.
6. The Mute Girl’s Diary
You, Our Story, you must allow me to speak.
I found these words scratched into the desk of my college classroom
waking one morning in the building
where I secretly slept most nights,
scavenging the cafeteria after the other students left
for their own classes.
We have something to say, and to unsay,
the mute girl wrote into our diary,
speaking with her tongueless tongue
as a continuation of flights,
no longer afraid.
But university was not yet a life we could abide,
though eventually we would return.
Thus we ended the first book,
and vanished into the silence.
7. Leaving the Past Behind
When a tree stands up on its own, Poet--
we call that its original face.
You listen with your eyes to the teachings
of stones, trees, mountains, and seas.
Come with us into the wilderness.
How could you hear my words if you do not hear this?
You are writing these scrolls,
hearing your own innermost request.
When you truly enter the world of words,
you find you are free of words.
Among trees and rivers, there is no reason to hide.
The boy wrote me this on the day we hitchhiked north,
leaving our pasts behind.
8. Returning the Stone: The Great Northwest
Blake called again—weep, weep, weep.
I wept and laughed, became a lumberjack.
Moved to the forest,
built a wiki-up in the mountains.
Lived as a hermit.
Learned to listen as words became trees and the trees
breathed our silence.
There’s no going back, the one-eyed boy said.
It’s just blood in the mouth.
This mystery sent a quiver through the black ink.
Find these syllables crows drop from their beaks
when you today awake to the sound
before sound in the forest,
the girl had crayoned into a stone downstream.
This passing into a new alphabet of dreams.
Can you read it yet, Poet?
9. Searching for the Voices After
Leaving a Bar in Walla Walla, Washington
The one-eyed boy was peering through the rows of books one afternoon
in a town library somewhere along the road,
where we followed the tracks of an abandoned train to a bar room of cowboys.
Later that night, toward dawn, sneaking out the basement window
of the library where I had slept,
the mute-girl who trailed us into these parts,
signaled to me
while studying a small fishing boat
on the river nearby.
Then waving her tiny hands
like birds floating in the air,
somehow speaking without words--
don’t worry, someday we’ll find home.
The birds around her, maybe they were the ones
Talking, and I wanted to understand.
I wrote this down in our diary
so I would remember the nameless sounds
coming off the rushing white caps of the water,
flying all about with these crazy cormorants.
10. A Few Words from the Wilderness
Before I Was Born
I wrote a play in verse, called it Sometimes Survival.
Dropped it off at a post office along the way to Alaska.
It’d been a hot summer of tending to the horses, bailing hay
in the depths of Wyoming.
And survival was enough.
The flickers of unwritten letters gathering
in voices of wind and rain
with these Appaloosa sleeping calmly in the fields.
The older trees further north called to us--
keep writing in your scrolls,
we need to hear our own stories.
Why, it’s like peeling back layers of skin, boy,
or opening the pages of a book
you thought you read long ago.
But you somehow missed the pages
that tell the story of your own life.
I bought a new set of clothes, a Russian dictionary, a knife,
the finest boots I could afford.
There were things I needed to do.
These languages will someday inhabit you, the angel muttered,
Brushing off her wings,
beginning to remember
how to fly,
and how to sing.
11. The Angel Beginning to Speak in Another Language
You want something permanent, boy,
but the world is not permanent.
It is indefinite, unknowable, complete with the magic of just what is.
Blue leaves floating on the water point to your scrolls,
the angel uttered in a hushed voice
by the campfire that first morning near the boats
where we had camped under a bridge with other fisherman,
discovering a new way.
12. Sailing the Seas: Finding Russia
First, working the canneries, then the fishing boats,
becoming a reader of clouds and stars,
navigating the awesome seas,
studying foreign words through the long nights
on deck alone keeping watch,
surrounded by albacore and shark.
We wandered a new vocabulary.
Soon enough working the freighters.
Cargo ships.
A gambler.
(This was too close a call to another death.)
Once, a driver of tractors. Combines.
A builder of houses.
A rogue, vagabond.
Going down circuitous, secret rivers.
Finally, just a bit of the deep blue sea for me…
Osip Mandelstam wrote in his own exile.
Years would pass in our dialogues.
My translations of Osip’s ‘notebooks’ continued.
Gradually other books of my own:
the lives of thomas: episodes & prayers
The Sasha Poems—A Book of Fables.
Bloodline: Selected Writings.
Though lost,
lost with the poets.
13. What Tense Do You Want to Live In?--
Fall of the Soviet Union and We Are There
Almost suddenly, an unknown poet appeared in the pocket.
Akhmatova wrote us one day in one of her poems--
Come, meet us poets.
Though it is forbidden.
Come, behind the Iron Curtain.
So many of us murdered,
Yet many are alive,
and continue our voices.
…the sleep bigger than hearing, the hearing older than dreaming,
unbroken, piercing, Mandelstam had written, and we translated in the diary.
The poets of the Soviet Union welcomed us.
I was thirty years old, becoming one of the many.
We read in subway stations, the long lines at kiosks, in cafes and on street corners, part of the kitchen culture of the scorned ‘citizens of the night.’ They honored me as a member of the unofficial Club Poetry.
Later, when the tanks bombed the Russian White House in 1991,
we read our poems for the underground radio.
We were all prisoners.
Yet we were breaking free.
Just a bit of the deep blue sea for me….
Meeting with students, passing tanks on the way to the university, arriving to the classroom in Moscow with the bombing audible nearby, reading Marina Tsvetaeva and Daniil Kharms aloud with the poets—later invited to read at Pasternak’s grave—gave me a deeper sense of poetry’s significance in the world.
What is it to think without your own native tongue?
Everything became translation.
Without any one language,
poetry embraces its own transliteration.
Osip saying before his own death in Stalin’s camps--
Only in Russia does poetry matter so much that they kill the poets.
Experiencing the rise and (and then demise again) of democracy, participating in endless protests and readings of poetry—profoundly changing my own tongues. How the sound of wound becomes word, the sound of forgiveness becomes freedom? I want that verb on horseback, the genitive. And now it was time to translate the song of the angel who came with me after my first baptism as we were now baptized illegally in Pushkin’s church on Lenin Hills, honoring the sound before sound.
14. The Angel Opens Her Broken Mouth
Over here.
Look around, boy.
There is the one beyond sound.
And it looks like you.
Each wave of the body a breath flying forth.
Hear your own voice among many, the angel called out,
standing in front of an armored personnel carrier of soldiers,
asking them in Russian—Where did you fellas get the Petrol to use against your own citizens?
These people are all wondering the same question as they stand and wait
in these food lines.
They’re starving, comrades.
15. Scrolls of a Temple Sweeper
We are born.
We die.
We return.
These words of the temple sweeper emerging in the scrolls with the one-eyed boy and mute girl, calling more strongly. First echoed in The Desire Notebooks, a book-length poem about the end and beginning of the world, traveling through time in all the places of destruction,
seen through the eyes of revolution in Russia: a telling and retelling of a story within timeless time, a pilgrimage through difficult landscapes of birth and death.
The Temple Sweeper spoke to me and I transcribed the words:
This wind has brought us together again—all of us always swooped together from some great storm. Or like these days and nights when the many, many thousands and millions of moons merge together, flow inward together, emerge together throughout the history of clocks and rhyme of bells to guide us lost children still remaining on the roads behind.
The mute girl then wrote this into our story, and hence we knew, it was time forge on.
16. The Monastery: From Tassajara to Bodhidharma’s Cave
At the age of forty, I became a monk.
It was in the monastery that the scrolls began to take shape and being.
The Temple Sweeper’s poetry unfolding in thousands of pages.
Though I was the temple sweeper now,
I translated his unknown alphabet into my own language.
A temple sweeper, a mute girl and a one-eyed boy traversing a torturous and tortured terrain, both natural and manufactured, a landscape of lost and found, of shapeshifters and ghosts and a prominent ghostwoman, of monks and hermit nuns, fish and birds. The angel grew to full height, singing more often in the pages.
A Zen monk, my concentration was hearing.
My name, Enduring Monk/Deep Sound.
We all made our way in the scrolls.
No force could hold us back.
What I remember tonight as I write this is that it seemed a trance caused me to lose track of time and place, of my body itself, of the boy I remembered as a boy, the boyhood of his wandering in the deserts and mountains before coming to this monastery. And this body was somehow again seeing me, recollecting, being, becoming.
And again we departed to be the wanderings of a poet,
a monk of no rank.
Entering a world among the miraculous.
I became a father.
I was born.
I died again.
Exiled.
Returned.
We traveled on,
into the refuges of the worlds,
from Bodhidharma’s cave to Rumi’s grave.
On deeper into China, Tibet, Cambodia,
the places we had always dreamed,
visible now.
The boy and girl and angel, inseparable,
Forming in a nightly choir, humming the sound--
All stories are trees.
All stories are sea.
All stories are river.
All stories are you.
All stories are we.
17. My Brother—A Passageway from San Quentin to Eternity
My brother Billy overdosed.
Blake began to, once more, weep—& sing us on.
With the help of the many poet-monks,
we got Billy released from prison.
These friends from the various abodes
of Christian, Sufi, Taoist and Buddhist homes I had met throughout the pilgrimages
of ten years came to my aid.
Everything changing.
Still, the last overdose, the last.
For years uncountable, we went on with Billy and Blake,
only in this body of red dust.
I wrote a book-length poem dedicated to him, which grew into a tetralogy,
singing along with, and for him:
First in a book, here, a poem for Billy High, and then, a book of unknowing, followed by you are everything you are not, and finally vanishing acts.
The acts of vanishing
all pointing to release.
This allowed me to explore what was possible in vernaculars of the inanimate: of trees, clouds, rivers and seas, and how the deep listening and penetrating of sounds transform the possible patterns of poetry, the peculiarities of voice as it translates into a passageway, or portal, time as being, Zen master Dogen once wrote, healing grief and love, traveling from birth through death and back again, carrying us further on with the voices yet untold. What emerged was that the meditation of writing is itself a pilgrimage.
It was time to go home.
18. A Letter from Suchness from Brother Bill
Ah big brother Ninso, brother Johnny,
Thank you for giving me, and hearing, this voice. My own voice, yet also of your own. One we’ve cultivated and healed over these years since I left this body of red dust, and also the joyful pure eternal being we are together.
Thank you for your sturdy meditations for us all. For your pages of liberation of so many lost children in the scrolls—with your own liberation from fear and doubts—for not turning away, for helping us as you, and we, go on in this way.
For the books you’ve written since boyhood, and for here itself, that you wrote for me, as our continuous return now manifests in your scrolls and your story of a boy’s odyssey.
Please celebrate it all, good brother monk and poet—and try not to forget how your very words bring an ease to those of us who’ve moved on in this great mystery, and for these all around you who each day in your lighting of the candles and offering of the incense, you dedicate your life in humbly offering gift-bestowing hands.
We are you, and you are us,
and we are grateful,
brother of mine.
Brother of the orphaned angel.
Of the orphaned one-eyed boy and mute girl,
and countless buddhas.
And we are already celebrating your miraculous arrival in this world of the many worlds, big brother, as you celebrate mine in this same month. Our singing and dancing commence together.
So chant the sutras, your prayers, your mantras—and realize we are chanting and vowing, bowing and smiling, with you.
We are not dead, nor gone.
Like the moon
Continuously shining
In the dark
Come forth.
We love you.
We are one.
And you can include this in your story, if you want.
Either way, always cherish these words, big brother.
Love,
Brother Bill